Thomas
Haines, editor-in-chief of the world’s largest aviation magazine,
AOPA Pilot, theorizes that the intriguing integrated electronics system
pictured at right “is called the Garmin G1000 because the average
general aviation pilot will say, ‘Gee!’ 1,000 times during
the demo flight.” It’s a clever line, but my excuse for repeating
it here is to add that the G1000—which puts mapping, radar, gauges,
controls, communications, and even live weather imagery across those multiple
monitors—also suggests where boat electronics are headed and that
Garmin is going to be there.

Haines
goes on to write that, while he and his readers in the Aviation Owners
and Pilots Association (AOPA) think of the G1000 as revolutionary, for
Garmin it’s simply evolutionary. That’s because “the
company founders Gary Burrell and Dr. Min Kao (the Gar and Min in Garmin)
have envisioned the G1000 since before they produced their first product
in 1989.” It’s worth noting that while these two hands-on
engineers first met while working on early aviation GPS, Burrell was already
a Lowrance alumnus. It’s also clear, at least retrospectively, that
they went out on their own with an apparently bottomless bag of vision
and drive.

In those
15 years Garmin has grown from a roomful of engineers into a major electronics
player that sold $572 million worth of mostly GPS-related products to
flyers, drivers, hikers, and boaters worldwide in 2003. These sales were
up more than 20 percent from 2002, which were up more than 20 percent
from 2001, and so on. Garmin is now building a 450,000-square-foot addition
to its Olathe, Kansas, headquarters and has its own manufacturing facility
in Taiwan. This sort of information may only be available because the
company went public in 2001; generally Garmin—like many tech companies—is
pretty tight-lipped about what it’s up to. For instance, a representative
declined to say how many of the current 900 employees in Olathe are engineers.
My guess is a heck of a lot.

Here’s
a nugget from Garmin’s annual report: “Management expects
that its research and development expenses [already $44 million] will
increase approximately 20 to 25 percent during 2004 due to the anticipated
introduction of approximately 45 new products.” No wonder the big
boys of marine electronics almost all consider Garmin their biggest long-term
worry. While some of these products—like the G1000 or tiny wrist-top
GPS for runners—will be of no use to boaters, Garmin has the habit
of accessorizing products in one niche with ideas developed in another.
The new 60C handheld plotter (see page 36) is a good example, able to
do turn-by-turn car routing almost as well as it does boat navigation.

But
the big news from Garmin is the recent unveiling of a multistation system
aimed squarely at larger boats. At the center are the spanking-new 3006
(6.4-inch) and 3010 (10.4-inch) color MFDs (multifunction displays). That’s
an expression we should all get used to; Raymarine is using it with its
new C Series, and it’s an apt term to describe the latest from Northstar
and Furuno. Garmin’s 3000 series MFDs look and act like its popular
2000 plotters and can similarly double as fishfinders with the addition
of a GSD20 black box and transducer, but there’s much more. The units
have dual video inputs and can output to a VGA monitor. They can also
purportedly provide verbal alarms and turn prompts (probably like the
company’s multilingual car navigation systems).